Filming in bombed locations around Italy and Germany, the immediate evocation of wartime and post-war moral zeros, ordinary Italian locals and American GIs playing themselves alongside professional actors: all these assets would be enough to make Rossellini’s gritty films made between 1945 and 1948 essential to the history of cinema. But cinema as vibrant life itself breathes in the pace and in most of the performances.

After the enervating excesses of Salome and Elektra at the weekend, the abundance of notes at the Proms continued in a piano recital and an orchestral showstopper, but this time with built-in air conditioning. After all, both 22-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor and septuagenarian Charles Dutoit are absolutely in control of the colours they make, very occasionally too much so. But it was a rainbow-hued day inside the Cadogan and Royal Albert Halls, culminating in a spectacular and perhaps unrepeatable Respighi triple bill of Roman impressions.

For those who believe spin is if not a modern invention, then at least a modern fascination, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar offers a sharp rejoinder. Interpretation, manipulation and persuasion pervade this incisive drama about the assassination of the Roman ruler, with the company donning layers of pretence as actors playing politicians whose lives unspool upon a stage; those who do not choose their lines with care are doomed to failure.

For Longborough to open their new season with Tosca after last summer’s triumphant Wagner is to invoke Joseph Kerman’s famous diatribe against Puccini’s “shabby little shocker” in his fifties book Opera as Drama. Kerman used Wagner’s theories to pick holes in Puccini’s at times flagrant theatricality: which only goes to show what an untheoretical thing opera can be.

Sacrilege alert: half the films released in the cinema can almost as happily be seen on a smaller screen. Flatulent Hollywood comedies, low-budget domesic dramas, most romcoms, the oeuvre of Leigh and Loach. The Great Beauty is not one of those films. As it comes out on DVD, it is important to advise anyone contemplating a purchase that the cinema is, if at all possible, the place to see this magnificent love letter to Rome, la città eterna. But it may not be possible, which is why this DVD is still an essential purchase.

With the end of 2013 nearly upon us it's time for a last look back before we step forward into the unknown. Yesterday our rundown of the year's finest films took you from a radiant romance to a bristling biopic, but the nature of such lists means that the best is yet to come and those that remain could hardly be more different. And so - our final five.

5 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)

In his later life Shakespeare, who never ducked ways to define a hero, offered the public a challenge: Coriolanus is a professional warrior, deaf to reason, patrician hater of people power. To beat all, this man’s man’s a mother’s boy. In a world trying to be newborn in democracy and a big society, Coriolanus sticks out like a sore thumb.

“Aren’t you sick of Britten yet?” asked a colleague three-quarters of the way through the composer’s centenary year. Absolutely not; there have been revelations and there still remains so much to discover or re-discover. Yet re-evaluation can sour as well as sweeten; acclaimed works in the canon may turn out less good than remembered.

The greatest strategy videogames deliver a balance of time to think and pressure to act. The greatest strategy videogames deliver the thrill of battle mixed with clear strategic choice. Several entries in the Total War series count as great strategy games. But not this one. The eighth in the series fails on two distinct fronts, both in terms of execution – vital to keep its hardcore of fans engaged – and in terms of engaging content for new players.

Loving the title. Caligula with Mary Beard. Professor Beard has been mentioned adjacently to some rum types of late. Internet trolls. AA Gill. They pale into nothingness, do they not, next to the emperor who mistook his horse for a consul. And his sister for a lover. You've heard the rumours. Caligula was huge in the Seventies, when such garishness blended with the wallpaper. Hence dyed blond crossdressing John Hurt being well weird in I, Claudius. Hence also Caligula's very own high-end eponymous porn movie. Those were the days. But are the stories all true?